190 HORRORS OF THE AIRICAN SLAVE TRADE. 



foam-track of the slaver. Fear gets the better of 

 avarice. The negroes, coffined in casks, or laden 

 with a sinking weiiiht ot irons, are swiftly lowered 

 into the sea. One plash, and one shriek, and all is 

 over. A moment's ripple curls where the sunny 

 water has closed over the dying : then the clear, 

 blue deep resumes its calm, and every trace of death 

 and of guilt is gone. Between those decks, so 

 lately reeking with animal dissolution, the fresh 

 wind blows again, and the pursuers, on comino up, 

 find the vessel tenanted but by the seamen of Por- 

 tugal and Brazil. i\o matter that her buihl, her 

 equipment, all the circumstances, all the incidents 

 of herself, of her ruffian commander, and of his 

 crew, conspire toward the one rank irresistible sus- 

 picion, — the only legal evidence is stifled with the 

 sufferers, and the miscreant triumphs in impunity. 

 Are these fictions ? things that never could hap- 



?en ; or, if by possibility they couicly yet never did ? 

 iCt the reader consult the Parliamentary documents, 

 and satisfy himself that fact has far outstripped in- 

 vention, it sometimes happens that the true is too 

 shocking to be the probable. But on this unhappy 

 subject there is nothing too shocking to be true. 

 Nor is it only by suffocation or the diseases it en- 

 genders, that the African on the middle passage falls 

 a victim to the cupidity of his oppressor. The re- 

 ports of the captors furnish painful histories of human 

 cargoes, brought up from their layers of infection in 

 the hold, to take the air on deck, who, overcome by 

 despair and torture, both of body and mind, seize 

 that short occasion to embrace their death by leap- 

 ing into the sea. 



Quarterly Review. 



